ulers
exercised their functions with discretion, and wielded their delegated
authority without offence. In such a novel intermixture, however, of
men born and nurtured in freedom, and the compliant minions of absolute
power, the catholic and the protestant, the active and the indolent,
some little time was necessary to blend the discrepant elements of
society. In attaining so desirable an end, woman was made to perform her
accustomed and grateful office. The barriers of prejudice and religion
were broken through by the irresistible power of the master-passion,
and family unions, ere long, began to cement the political tie which had
made a forced conjunction, between people so opposite in their habits,
their educations, and their opinions.

Middleton was among the first, of the new possessors of the soil, who
became captive to the charms of a Louisianian lady. In the immediate
vicinity of the post he had been directed to occupy, dwelt the chief
of one of those ancient colonial families, which had been content to
slumber for ages amid the ease, indolence, and wealth of the Spanish
provinces. He was an officer of the crown, and had been induced to
remove from the Floridas, among the French of the adjoining province, by
a rich succession of which he had become the inheritor. The name of
Don Augustin de Certavallos was scarcely known beyond the limits of
the little town in which he resided, though he found a secret pleasure
himself in pointing it out, in large scrolls of musty documents, to an
only child, as enrolled among the former heroes and grandees of Old and
of New Spain. This fact, so important to himself and of so little
moment to any body else, was the principal reason, that while his more
vivacious Gallic neighbours were not slow to open a frank communion
with their visiters, he chose to keep aloof, seemingly content with the
society of his daughter, who was a girl just emerging from the condition
of childhood into that of a woman.

The curiosity of the youthful Inez, however, was not so inactive. She
had not heard the martial music of the garrison, melting on the evening
air, nor seen the strange banner, which fluttered over the heights that
rose at no great distance from her father's extensive grounds, without
experiencing some of those secret impulses which are thought to
distinguish the sex. Natural timidity, and that retiring and perhaps
peculiar lassitude, which forms the very groundwork of female
fascinati